Film screening - Sow the Wind, followed by Q&A with director André Singer

Sow the Wind will tell the story of Kazakhstan’s place in the Cold War struggle for nuclear supremacy, and the power of the human spirit as victims and participants from that struggle find their own ways to survive.

Between 1949 and 1989 the Soviet Union carried out 456 nuclear tests on the Kazakh steppes in an area roughly the size of Belgium. Soviet operations were wreathed in secrecy, but it is becoming clear that the Kazakh villagers who faced the daily reality of living in nuclear fall out zones continue to be victims of a war that was not their own.

This feature-length documentary will follow Kazakhstan’s fight to be rid of its nuclear legacy and its call for a peaceful world free from the threat of nuclear weapons.

André Singer

André Singer is President of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, CEO of the TV and Film Production Company, Spring Films, and Visiting Professor of Film at the University of Westminster.

He was awarded his doctorate from Oxford University as an anthropologist specialising in Iran and Afghanistan and has subsequently followed a twin-track career in both anthropology and filmmaking. His last film as director was the feature documentary about recording genocide in the WW2 Concentration Camps called Night Will Fall which won several international awards including the Royal Television Society award for historical documentary and the Peabody Award from the University of Georgia.

He has also co-produced award-winning films by Werner Herzog including Into the Abyss and Death Row, and with Josh Oppenheimer The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence. He has just completed a film on the nuclear legacy in Kazakhstan called Sow the Wind.